This four-volume, reset collection takes as its starting point the earliest substantial descriptions of tea as a commodity in the mid-seventeenth century, and ends in the early nineteenth century with two key events: the discovery of tea plants in Assam in 1823, and the dissolution of the East India Company’s monopoly on the tea trade in 1833

Volume 1 General Introduction Literary Representations of Tea and the Tea-Table General Introduction, Select Bibliography, Introduction, Nahum Tate, Panacea: a Poem upon Tea (1700) ‘On Tea Tables and Visiting Days’ (1707) Peter Anthony Motteux, A Poem upon Tea (1712) Nathaniel Mist, Letters for and against Tea-Drinking, Miscellany Letters (1722) Whipping-Tom: or, a Rod for a Proud Lady, ‘Discourse II. Of the Expensive Use of Drinking Tea’ (1722) ‘Discourse II. Melancholy Considerations of the Universal Poison’ (1722) Allan Ramsay, The Tea-Table Miscellany (1723) Tea. A Poem. Or, Ladies into China-Cups (1729) James Bland, ‘Of her Temperance’, An Essay in Praise of Women (1733) John Waldron, A Satyr against Tea (1733) Tea, a Poem. In Th ree Cantos (1743) John Lockman, To the Long-Conceal’d First Promoter of the Cambrick and Tea-Bills (1746) The Tea Drinking Wife, and Drunken Husband (1749) A New Tea-Table Miscellany (1750) George Colman, ‘Number LX. Th ursday, March 20, 1755. A Dialogue Between a Tea-Table and a Card-Table’, Connoisseur (1755–6) ‘A Description of a Public Tea-Drinking’, The Register of Folly (1773) Timothy Touchstone, Tea and Sugar (1792) The Art of Making Tea, a Poem, in Two Cantos (1797) Hans Busk, ‘The Tea’ (1819) Editorial Notes